VideoMaterial appears pixellated in Away3D

I'm working on a spherical movie viewer in Away3D & am having a problem when I apply a VideoMaterial texture to a 3D primitive. The video appears heavily pixellated, like it's being scaled or hugely compressed. When I apply a BitmapMaterial of a single still image from the video it appears fine, so I don't think the resolution of the video is the problem.

I found [this discussion][1] suggesting a solution by specifying the "fixedHeight" & "fixedWidth" when I call the constructor, but those arguements seem to h开发者_开发问答ave no effect, and I can't find them in the API either. I do see something called "lockH" & "lockW," [in the API][3], but I they don't seem to have any effect either.

Here's the code constructing the VideoMaterial.

//basic intro setup stuff and then...
var videoURL:String = "assets/clip.flv";
this.primitive = new Sphere({material:"blue:#cyan", radius:50000, rotationX:100, segmentsW:30, segmentsH:30});
//more code to setup the rest of the scene, and implement some texture switching, then...
this.primitive.material = new VideoMaterial({file:videoURL, lockH:1000, lockW:2000});

For reference, I'm building off this example as a starting point, and I'm using Away3D 3.6 & Flex 4.5.1 in Eclipse Indigo.

[1]: [3]:

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To get rid of the pixelation, set smooth to true. This will obviously not increase the resolution, but it will activate anti-aliasing, the same way that smoothing=true on a native BitmapData does (internally that's exactly what it does.)

If you are going to use a video or bitmap material on a sphere that is used as an environment in a full-screen view, you will need to have a really high resolution video/bitmap. At any one time you can only see at most a third of the sphere surface, and it covers a screen area of more than 1000 pixels in width, so that tells me that your video will need to be at least 3000 pixels wide for it not to suffer from stretch issues.

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I'm afraid to say that this is 'normal'. It mostly has to do with the efficiency of actionscript code and the lack of hardware acceleration and anti-aliasing. It's essentially impossible to do a transform of your video onto a primitive without having some sort of loss in quality because frankly, actionscript isn't really made for this kind of intense calculations.

With that said however, there is hope. There's a new Flash Player coming out "soonish" (or so I've heard) that will have a basic hardware accelerated 3D renderer (codename "Molehill") that Away3d and other 3d engines (like Alternativa) is hard at work implementing already. This would mean that the video would then be anti-aliased and should therefor be smooth, but I can't confirm this since I've never tried.